Progress Reports

I understand that you recently made yourself some kidneys and urinated for the first time. I'd congratulate you on that, but the idea that you're already peeing on yourself seven months before you even show up seems sort of ominous to me.

Your mom is supposed to let people in on the imminence of your arrival this weekend. I'm hopeful she'll finally get the excited screams she's been after. You of course know how I feel. I'm happy, but I try to reserve the screams for sightings of spiders and Justin Timberlake. Besides, there's lots left to do.

On that front, I've been working on the book. I kind of hate writing. I think I forgot that. It's scary how long it's been since I've actually written anything new. It seems like I've been doing polishes and revisions on other things forever. Part of me that was hoping that would be enough, that maybe we could just make do with what I've already committed to paper and finance an early retirement.

The hardest thing is just making myself sit down to do it. When I first started dating your mom I'd give her a hundred dollars at the beginning of the week and unless I could turn in a certain number of pages she'd keep it. I'll try to explain to you the depth of my cheapness at a later date, but suffice to say, it was effective. Now that we have a joint account it's less so. I'm thinking of bringing some other folks on board, handing in my pages on a daily or weekly basis, and relying on fear and embarrassment to help me keep them readable and on time. In any case, I'm on it, but you growing those kidneys was a big step. I think you might be getting ahead of me.

As for the other stuff, I haven't started my dunking program yet. It's supposed to take 15 weeks to achieve my maximum vertical leap. If I start next week that puts me above the rim right about my next birthday.

On the language front, I got a piece of spam today (difficult to explain, just bear with me) that was in English, but it was off just enough that you could tell is was written by a foreigner. This really brought home how long it takes to learn a language. Knowing all the words is just the beginning. Also, I was watching a movie today and this one character starts trying to seduce another by speaking in French. The best I could translate it he said, "I also speak very good French, and you, you are ham." I don't think that's right. If it is I feel like it was a sub-par come on. Anyhow, that pretty much tells you where I'm at linguistically.

Probably a lot of rubbing and patting coming your way this weekend. Best you learn to deal with it now. It only gets worse when you make it to this side.

Novel - Ch 7
Dunking - Next week we fly
French - You, you are ham